Midland homeschooled boy wins first place in bee

Published 6:00 pm, Saturday, March 8, 2008

Twelve-year-old Samuel Dowlen of Midland walked up to the podium, a slight hop in his step.

By Audrie Palmer

Midland Reporter-Telegram

'The Spelling Bug'

Twelve-year-old Samuel Dowlen of Midland walked up to the podium, a slight hop in his step. He looked at the moderator of the competition, down at the three judges and back up to the moderator again.

This was it; if he spelled the next word correctly, he was on his way to the national competition in Washington, D.C.

Out of the 33 students participating in Saturday's 21st annual Reporter-Telegram regional spelling bee competition, the final five competitors had gone 15 rounds with each other before eliminating three.

Now, the six-round battle between Dowlen and 10-year-old Thomas Rubio, also of Midland, might finally come to an end.

John Deats from Midland College, who was serving as the announcer and moderator of the contest, looked at Dowlen and told him the word he had to spell next was "cybernetics".

He told him the word originated from Greek.

He used it for him in a sentence.

As defined by Webster's dictionary, it means the study of human control functions and of mechanical electronic systems designed to replace them.

And then Dowlen answered: "C-Y-B-E-R-N-E-T-I-C-S. Cybernetics."

The judges paused and gave a nod of their heads. They looked up at Deats on stage.

"I believe we have a winner - lucky number seven," Deats exclaimed. "I can just imagine the long hours of hard work that, not only our winner, but the other spellers have put into this."

But Dowlen stood there, shocked and stunned he had won. His family, sitting two rows from the back of the auditorium in the Allison Fine Arts Building at Midland College, started cheering and making calls on their cell phones to friends and family.

And when the realization hit the homeschooled pre-teen a few seconds later, he raised his right arm into the air for victory, then both arms, and then there at the podium, he started to cry.

"He really, really wanted this," his mother Stephanie Dowlen said.

When Stephanie and her husband Scott started homeschooling Samuel in the second grade, Stephanie said she realized her son could spell at an eighth grade level, so she started him there.

Last year after competing in the Midland Association of Christian Home Educators' preliminary competition, Samuel competed at the regional contest where he took home second place.

This year, he started studying around mid-December about 30 minutes every day, his mom said.

His mother would read him words and he would write the ones down that he got wrong. Then he would go back and review those.

"I had the 'Spelling Bug'," Dowlen said.

But his hard work paid off; now the family's excited they'll be able to attend the 81st Annual Scripps National Bee in Washington from May 25 to 31.

Stephanie said she's been teaching her boys about American history and they are really excited to be able to go and see the nation's capital.

Asked if their youngest son Sawyer, age 8, would ever like to follow in his big brother's shoes, his mom said no.

"He likes to encourage, but he's creative in other ways," she said.

And as for the older Dowlen brother, who took home a $100 savings bond, a $50 cash prize, a 1-year-subscription to Encyclopedia Britannica and the first-place trophy, he said he'd like to one day work with in the alternative fuel industry as an engineer.